


magnanimity and maternality

by handschuhmaus



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Cockney Voldemort (sort of), Gen, Sane Voldemort, Voldemort grew up during World War II, as I think roofies were already a concern, handwaving that probably ahistoric viewpoint, likely not strictly historically accurate regarding therapy, or medically accurate about the poison, reference to love potion noncon as rape, this nonsense idea that your parents taking love potion stops you being capable of loving
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-29
Updated: 2020-02-29
Packaged: 2021-02-25 13:07:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,558
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22496587
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/handschuhmaus/pseuds/handschuhmaus
Summary: Voldemort gets confronted with a challenge to his idea of a mother's love.
Relationships: Bellatrix Black Lestrange & Voldemort, Death Eater Characters & Tom Riddle | Voldemort, Harry Potter & Tom Riddle | Voldemort, Merope Gaunt & Tom Riddle, Severus Snape & Voldemort
Comments: 6
Kudos: 27
Collections: Flashing into the New Year





	magnanimity and maternality

**Author's Note:**

  * For [limeta](https://archiveofourown.org/users/limeta/gifts).
  * In response to a prompt by [limeta](https://archiveofourown.org/users/limeta/pseuds/limeta) in the [flashing_into_the_new_year](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/flashing_into_the_new_year) collection. 



> "It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life." -Captain Jean-Luc Picard
> 
> "Every time we fall in love or make a friend, hold someone tight or choose a muffin, get pregnant or buy new underwear, paint a room or eat a sandwich; every choice we make to stay, to treat ourselves as valuable people, to connect more and more with this thing that can end only in loss, in death, loneliness, holey underwear or shit; every time we choose connection, we are risking loss. But every time we do not choose connection, we are ensuring it." - "Came Down a Person", by Ella Young, in _Same Time Next Week_ (which you can read [here](https://www.creativenonfiction.org/excerpt/4035/4375) **trigger warning** for suicide attempts among other things)
> 
> **Prompt:**
> 
> _Tom Riddle just realising that he's chosen an unimaginably incompetent side to fight a war with and wonders if he can get away with fleeing the war (1st, 2nd, dealer's choice)_
> 
> Let me say that I _loved_ the other response to this prompt (in fact, it was how I discovered the prompts) and have no wish to detract from it in any way, but this gave me a plot bunny(!). Probably also inspired by said other response, "You Asked If I Was Happy". (and so, two months after anyone was probably expecting...)

It began with a story. A bloody storybook story being read for the benefit of the kids at something more intimate than a gala and less purposeful than a meeting really (and Voldemort reluctantly concluded that it was more like an ...extended family dinner than anything else, except who went around inviting the Dark Lord to their family dinners, excuse you?)

In fact, it was a peculiarly stupid story in Voldemort's eyes, a story about a mother dying to save her children, and he failed to hide his vitriolic disdain.

The problem was (the problem always was), instead of going along with his way and critiquing the story, the Death Eaters (the _purebloods_ ; Snape, for instance, wasn't here) banded together to insist that if he'd grown up with proper pureblood education, he couldn't possibly be a detractor to a vital part of wizarding culture. 

He let the issue, or rather the discussion thereof, die, but it still haunted him. Dying to save your children wasn't noble, it just left you _dead_ and them in a shite situation, dinnit? And Dumbledore had taunted him, outright taunted him, in an address before the Wizengamot, saying "... _our enemy underestimates the strength of a mother's love for her child._ "

Yeah. Right. Because, said the evidence, young Tom Marvolo Riddle had a disability in an essential area of humanity, one that Dumbledore clearly wanted to publicize to the world: conceived under the influence of a love potion, Lord Voldemort was congenitally incapable of the emotion.

So what? So he'd gone looking for flattery, devotion, power, instead, and what did it get him? His own Death Eaters saying "You aren't properly appreciative of a vital part of our culture," taunting him.

(Tom Marvolo Riddle was less than nothing to Muggles and to Muggleborns, but he'd lucked upon the fact that his idiot parents had conveyed upon him a little of the blood that mattered more to these people, to the purebloods, than the sheer doggedness and strength his own understanding of the world emphasized. If you had more power that your enemies, you weren't going to, for instance, get bombed. The purebloods were weak as crumbling sandstone in that respect, having rarely or never been tested. But they cared about Salazar Slytherin.)

In fact, young (and fatally enamored) Lucius Malfoy let his tongue run off: "Perhaps, my lord, you should visit a mind healer, if you cannot understand the pure and elemental nature of a pureblood mother's love."

_Maybe he should, at that; maybe they'd prove capable to exorcise this impotent and terrible irritation he was feeling at the taunting._

Bellatrix Black, soon to be Lestrange, shifted (Voldemort thought uneasily), and itched at her elaborate lace collar, glancing at him. She'd confided that she had no wish to be a mother ( _Mutterkreuz_ , they had called it, as if making a new generation, perhaps one that didn't appreciate its own existence, was the only valorous aim. Imperative of the species, and another thing the love potion furtively brewed in the little hovel had stolen away.), would much rather be involved in the fight, and sometimes Voldemort thought no one ever had understood his feelings half so well. Even if there were worrying signs that Bellatrix might not have all her sanity about her.

He opened his mouth to say something about the orphanage, about how Cole's was where the love of a dying mother got you, a mother who had been desperate for love, and abruptly found he had no stomach for the critique this might bring down on him. It was not as if Bellatrix could jump to his rhetorical aid; if she voiced sentiments too far from pureblood orthodoxy it might imperil her impending marriage, and his favor was not enough to alter this.

So instead he shut his mouth (like he had so many times before he reached majority), and suffered through a second, and saccharin, tale.

* * *

Bellatrix and Snape were the only ones in the same house (some family's second or third manor; he knew which but it failed to come to mind and the fact hardly seemed vital to the incident) with him the next week, and Snape completely and totally engrossed in a half-dozen parallel brewings, some in multiple-cauldron batches.

So, for the first time in his life, Voldemort took someone to the hospital (to St Mungo's, naturally; it wouldn't do to take a pureblood Black to hospital as her first Muggle establishment, and it might be a magical ailment besides), because something was _wrong_ with Bellatrix, and she actually was someone he would hate to lose, purely for expediency. 

She was crying and screaming and laughing hysterically. She momentarily tried to cling to him, but caught sight of his face and moved away; something twisted in his chest as he assured himself it was just her reverence for her lord, and not revulsion. 

They were dispatched (with hushed whispers and skeptical glances, but things hadn't escalated to the guerrilla war he foresaw yet) to the mental healing ward.

And a short, plump ( _plump_ , so different from at Cole's, and he wondered why he thought of that until he realized she was pretty obviously muggleborn and/or a Muggle groupie of some sort) woman in healer's whites emerged from the door marked "Authorized persons only" to stand in front of them. 

"I'm afraid it's only me today and Mickey Abbott; everyone else is off at a seminar, and Mick says he doesn't dare do anything with a Black," she said, in an accent that took him back, years and years back, and he wondered how she had gotten through Hogwarts without someone vociferously insisting she lose that "low-class Cockney". As they had to him.

But for all she's making him remember the worries of Tom Riddle, that also made him more willing to comply, in the interest of expediting Bellatrix's treatment. His favorite woman Death Eater (the only one so far, really--not because he went excluding them but because witches are for being mothers among the purebloods, and mothers don't fight, unless their children are actively endangered) had quieted just a little, and there's a glazed look to her eyes and an uncomfortable warmth to her skin where he took her arm to side-along.

"Can I take you back to the examination room?" she addressed Bellatrix calmly and in a touch closer to RP, perhaps supposing that an agitated person might not take the effort to decipher an unfamiliar accent.

Bellatrix laughed, long and bitter and frightful, a little ironic and as much scream as laugh. She made no move to detach from Voldemort.

"Deirdre Marsh" (the name on her badge that Voldemort now glanced at) looked him in the face, probably knowing he was a notorious Slytherin and probably also noticing all the inhuman touches to his features that had accrued through his experiments with dark magic, and asked "Could you come back with her? If that will help, I might not have to sedate her for examination, which can be tricky."

Lord Voldemort, under any other circumstance might have objected that it did not befit a person of his stature and power to bother doing so (too, he was struck with a horrible thought of his somehow being expected to attend the birth of the child he had never cared to have, and his brain assigned the face of the mother in this chilling sequence that of Bellatrix Black.) but he was actually worried about Bellatrix.

He arose, and, carefully supporting Bellatrix, followed Deirdre Marsh to a small, almost square, examination room, painted a calming light green and containing several chairs and an exam couch.

After a few moments and some effort, Bellatrix was extricated from his arm and convinced to at least stand by the exam couch, hovering uneasily and staring right through Deirdre Marsh. The healer cast a couple of obviously diagnostic spells and grimaced as a sickly yellow light, like sodium lamps he had seen on his travels, enveloped her patient.

"Was she trying to take any potion?" she asked him. 

To that, Voldemort could only shrug (or otherwise indicate uncertainty); he had not been in the same room as Bellatrix all morning, and was not privy either to her plans or even intent.

"It would appear she's got straight belladonna poisoning. And it is a poison, but usually there'd be some other magical effect if it were as part of a potion." _Belladonna_ , beautiful woman, and Bellatrix, woman warrior. He had the impression that she'd gotten the latter solely because of the Black family fixation on star names. It was not clear that either her family or the Lestranges approved of the idea of a warrior, except, again, as a _mother's_ last resort. Then again, he had the distinct impression that the two Lestrange brothers were, primarily, homosexual, which probably vastly complicated things. Why would Bellatrix take belladonna? Voldemort vaguely recollected something about beauty uses giving it its name, but he earnestly thought that was a topical application.

"What aren't you telling me?" Deirdre Marsh asked, in a firm but kind tone. It would have reminded him of Dumbledore--if he had ever known the man to sound genuinely sympathetic. 

He didn't know what to say, though; to him there was no way that his reflection on naming things and people (a topic important to "I am Lord Voldemort") is pertinent.

"It's a trial by ordeal," Bellatrix said, out of the blue, and almost as if she were narrating some grand epic like the tale of Beowulf.

Deirdre sighed. "Let me give you the antidote and _then_ you can tell us about it."

Voldemort was stunned to note that she actually drew out something into a syringe; he had thought injections were purely Muggle medicine. And the healer, perhaps noticing his eyes, explained: "There's some evidence that magic interferes with the action of the antidote if the atropine wasn't magically bound into a potion."

"But it is a potions ingredient," he reiterated, feeling uncertain.

Deirdre huffed. "It most certainly is. I'm pretty strictly a mind healer, actually, and I don't know why they can't check for this downstairs. Would you hold her hand, in hopes she'll stay still while I do the injection?"

The needle went in, Voldemort averted his eyes, and perhaps thirty seconds later, Bellatrix heaved a deep but less hysterical sigh and admitted, "My lord, I was hoping to... to measure up to expectations, and to demonstrate to you that a properly motherly woman need not be...some weakling. But I failed. I did not realize the meaning of the text. It was a magic that failed to be mastered--" Deirdre frowned, probably half at the form of her address to him, and half at the content of this brief speech.

He was frustrated by that idea, and there was a decided irony, he decided, in the statement coming from a half-blood orphan who adapted to garner the old families' favor, even as he told Bellatrix, "If they cannot accept you as you are, they do not deserve to have what they want you to be."

A moment as they processed things, then "I have to--" she began, without really elaborating, and Deirdre gestured towards the corridor.

"Second door down on your right, that's a left out of the door. Perfectly normal reaction to the antidote."

Voldemort let loose of all control of his tongue. "What is the point of mother's love--it's 'mother's love this, and mother's love that' with them, and all it's gotten her are these preposterous expectations and me it got a childhood in a fu--bloody Muggle orphanage?!"

"Mothers are people, too," said Deirdre bloody Marsh, with a hardwon and irritating patience. "Have you had everything you ever tried to do go right?"

He heard her, but the response wasn't quite to her words. Instead, it was to the implication that he'd felt hurled at him time and time again, that it was an impiety to fail to properly adore his mother, and thus he richly deserved every insult of orphan existence. "I am congenitally incapable of love," he admitted, and protested, and stated aloud for the first time ever.

Whatever Deirdre Marsh had been about to say, she stopped abruptly and fixed him with a calculating look, but one more like Abraxas Malfoy (eventually), somehow, than Albus Dumbledore. "I am a mind healer," she said, with a steadfast determination, "and that is more up my alley than belladonna poisoning."

"It's not something you can fix!" he protested. "There's something, probably, about the magic exchanging the child's ability to love for the love received from the potion."

Deirdre Marsh snorted, and seemed to have half a dozen things to say at once, talking suddenly fast. "You mean love potions? Which shouldn't be called that, and who told you this, who made you think that's how it works?"

Voldemort was still emotional, when he snapped, "Come now, the result was from no less a person than Albus Dumbledore."

She nearly yelled in her reply. "Who was armchair philosophizing on an area quite outside his expertise. Lesson one, for you: love is not a finite resource," enunciating each word with a frankly surprising vehemence.

"You're telling me you, a Muggleborn, don't respect Albus bloody Dumbledore," Voldemort blurted in disbelief, but didn't fail to take note of the statement, finding it odd but not implausible.

"He's... exceeded his grasp on good sense and facts," the healer dismissed, "and lesson two: love potions don't evoke love, they lower inhibitions and evoke infatuation and most of them ought to be called rape potions."

He was speechless for a long moment before he could reply, "Are you saying my mother was a rapist?" It seemed more absurd and more world-shifting than he could possibly stand, despite his holding next to no fondness for Merope Gaunt.

She heaved a sigh and ...slowed down. "That's...a little complicated. Because that was what, fifty years back? '

"Almost. Not quite."

"She wouldn't have had much concept of it as that. They didn't... they didn't understand how it works."

"You're telling me," said Voldemort in a tone more sarcastic than he really wanted to be, "they didn't understand the function of ancient love potions at that time?"

Marsh put her fist on her hip, a bit confrontationally. "More like they didn't care to have a coherent model acknowledging that coerced intercourse is little if at all better than violent rape. About its only advantage is fewer injuries, but I'm not sure that it's not more psychicly damaging. Like Imperius, but that was a pragmatic ban rather than something ever addressed in philosophy of magic."

His lips curled into a sneer at a complicated association: he'd never heard of "philosophy of magic" before, and at the services Cole's orphans regularly went to, the preacher or whatever he was (Tom Riddle had had no use for religion, mostly because the only Muggle Christianity he saw had had no use for him, believing the claims that he was practically evil by age six. Thus he had no idea what the man's proper title was.) had now and again derided philosophers as godless men, to be shunned by all good people. Then again, he did not particularly respect that authority (he didn't respect Dumbledore either), so why did he pay attention to him--them? "Psychic damage to the child?"

"No!" she declared vehemently. "To the victim, having realized that they participated in something they wouldn't normally, something masquerading as an emotion humans hold pretty sacred. Lesson three is that the word 'love' has many definitions in English, and lesson four is that the most central definition of love, for all humans, is care for someone, or even something."

Eager almost despite himself to move on from this awkward topic about his mother, he scoffed. "I haven't found myself caring for anyone yet."

Deirdre Marsh pinned him with accusatory eyes. "Not quite fifty years ago, you said. So, '30? You would have been at Hogwarts during the war, and they'd have sent you back in the summer to your orphanage, probably in the city."

"In London," he admitted, feeling dreadfully transparent and uncomfortably examined.

She let loose an incredulous whistle. "During the Blitz. Mmm. I thought it might be something like that. Look, I can't imagine you want to hear this, if you hang around with Blacks, but wizard mind healing is decidedly antiquated, and ill-equipped to deal with things I find really interesting. What I've gleaned from the little bit of Muggle literature I've read is that that sort of trauma can _change_ our minds. Like shellshock--you heard of it?"

Voldemort's heart thudded in his chest and the air in the small exam room suddenly seemed soupy. And yet he wasn't rejecting the conclusion on reflex or because of the Muggle association. No, it was just that the thought that he had never quite brought himself to blame the war. Instead he had long blamed his own insufficiencies and the callousness of more innocent people. "I don't--I don't go back to it. Blacked it out of my bloody mind," he said, having heard that such soldiers had flashbacks. And he slipped as he said it into the Cockney he had trained himself out of at Hogwarts. 

Deirdre Marsh, mind healer, gave him a small and sad but encouraging smile. "But the orphanage and the war--you didn't get close to people, did you? Learned by heart the harsh lesson that you were apt to lose them, right?"

He suddenly felt shaky as well, and angry, as if he wanted to deny something but he couldn't quite think what was in error. She was ...right, in a manner of speaking. Tom Riddle was perspicacious enough to notice that people didn't like him; an unreciprocated liking of someone else was just more pain he didn't need. And even his pureblood confidants he had hardened himself to the thought of losing. He said, in a small and almost breaking voice "I don't love anyone," but this time it wasn't refutation or scorn, it was a shocked and painful realization.

"You brought Miss Bellatrix Black here," she stated, almost like it was a counterargument but he couldn't fathom how.

"Yes, well, it was an emergency and I could not send ...my potions master with her because he was dreadfully busy."

"Would you regret losing Miss Black?" the healer asked patiently.

"Ye-es," he made two syllables of it and his voice cracked. Always before, he was presently acutely aware, that meant a danger of losing her.

"Would you inconvenience yourself--I'm not saying risk your life, just... discomfort--to help her?"

"I--I did so. I brought her here."

"I think maybe you could love her," Deirdre Marsh proposed, and a cold panic rose in his abdomen.

"I don't--she--I wouldn't want to marry her. She would hate it." Her words trying to explain why she took poison in a "trial by ordeal" echoed in his head and he was repelled but not quite angered just now by the idea of resigning Bellatrix to the existence of a proper wife and mother. 

"I _meant_ "--there was a light rebuking coolness in her voice--"as a friend. Friendship is a kind of love. How do you feel about that?"

"I'm not sure she could think of me as a friend," Voldemort admitted, faintly, and without enthusiasm.

"Can you think of her as a friend--can you think of me, as a friend, as your friend?"

"I just met you today," he protested, and wondered when Bellatrix would get back. 

She admitted, at first quietly, "I'd like to help you. With the idea that you can't love, and the trauma from the war. But I'd like to know right now if you can think of her as a friend."

"Perhaps," the man who had been the reviled orphan ventured, both resolve and uncertainty in the single word.

"Is there anyone else who you feel might understand you?"

The image of Severus Snape crashed into his mind, unbidden. He didn't like to show any favoritism in that direction: the boy's witch mother had quickly been labeled blood traitor and the prospect of two halfbloods talking might raise the specter in Slytherin heads of a rights campaign, but he was an excellent potioneer. Furthermore... if he permitted himself the vulnerability, it was possible Snape would understand some aspects of his childhood; despite having both parents, he had grown up poor and by some accounts likely mistreated. "Maybe," he admitted, but defiantly.

"Does it hurt to think about the idea?"

"Well, yes."

"Lesson five is about a painful lesson you've probably learned from the hard-knock school of life. Sometimes, love means we have emotions that are intense and even unpleasant, but it's so good for us we do it anyway. We hate pain, want to avoid it, want to avoid cessation of consciousness. And yet we pluck the rose and the raspberry through their thorns." After a beat, she asked "Ever had a pet?"

"My snake, Nagini." He wasn't all that eager to answer; he was mostly resentful of how right he already thought she was, and the idea that a good thing came with yet more pain.

Before she could reply, Bellatrix came back in.

**Author's Note:**

> ...whoops, I'm going to put this in two parts, actually.
> 
> (note: the paragraph referring to religion does not fully reflect views of the author, and is by no means a universal indictment of any religion including the (predominant in the region of the world) Christianity mentioned. However, it does claim that, as with what Deirdre said of mothers, human religious leaders (and congregations) can have their foibles, which I do stand by. In this case the one particular pastor/priest (perhaps a grudge against Bertrand Russell, who would have been publishing in the fairly recent past?) of Riddle's youth has an issue with philosophy; I am not aware of that being a widespread institutional issue (which do also exist; that's just not one I've heard of). Also their callousness towards kid Riddle is a human failing rather than one peculiar to a faith system)


End file.
